My mail started crashing after 2 days of running fine as well. One one of my users, the program won't open at all and on the other, it will open but then crash in about a minute or two. I think it all started happening right after I started messing with messages.

I'm wondering if your app stays open long enough for you to open window/previous recipients to see if it is empty like mine. I also notice that there is no auto suggestion on addresses in mail.

I do have addresses in my address book but mail just isn't seeing them or storing new recipients.

I have tried all fixes mentioned for mail, messages, address book, and previous contacts. Nothing worked. I even reinstalled ML and that didn't help. I also spent about 2 hours on the phone with Apple. The guy who was helping me said it was the first issue with mail he knew about. Nothing that we tried helped.

For me Mail crashes instantaneously -- as soon as I click the app -- so I don't have a chance to check anything. There are several threads on this issue -- some folks say that they were told by the Apple rep that they are getting "floods" of issues related to Mail on Mountain Lion.

I was able to fix mine by using Appdelete to delete everything except the mail.app itself. So one of those preference items was the culprit. However this deletion is now causing problems with iCloud integration with mail so this scortched earth tactic isn't optimal.

I wasn't able to set icloud mail back up through the icloud panel BUT when starting mail I was able to add the iCloud email and it set itself up normally. Then when checking the iCloud control panel, mail sync was on and working fine. So this is a fix but one of last resort as it does delete your mail accounts.

Having the identical problem on my Mac Pro. My other computers are fine after the upgrade. It seemed to occur around the same time MobileMe went offline and I'm wondering if email aliases could be a culpret.

But basically I just moved the following directory to a backup and let Mail recreate a new one. Please be aware that this fix just refeshes your Mail, i.e. you'll need to readd your accounts and if you pop your mail, then I'm not certain if you can re-import them back in :-

/Users/sean/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail/Data

More specifically it was the following file (or some other file in the same directory?) that mattered :-

You're the man! I renamed ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail and started Mail -- no more crashes! It rebuilt everything and now my Mail app is working again! Thanks.

Some notes:

[1] I didn't even have a file ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail/Data/Library/Saved Application State/com.apple.mail.savedState/data.data so I just went to the top level directory (com.apple.mail) and renamed that.

[2] I didn't lose any data -- Mail rebuilt it from my emails although I did notice that the directory ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail/Data/Library/Mail Downloads no longer exists. So I don't quite know where Mail relocated the attached files, but I checked and I can access them by searching.

I was reconciled to waiting for a Mountain Lion update before I could start using Mail again, but thanks to you I am now back in business.

I echo Sanjaya's remarks, notes, and applaud. You sir, are the man! I tried the saved states deletion, but found that it didn't do anything, but remove the first dialog message (before the crash log). I went back to ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail/ and moved the contents to the trash (but not emptied). Opened Mail and everything was there, even the last message I had left open behind the viewer. I didn't have to re-add anything, just had to reinstate my view preferences; akin to flashing the PRAM.

Thanks again Sean! Without your help, I wouldn't have ventured down that path. It's fixed!

I read through several threads before I found this one. My machine does NOT have ~/Library/Containers/...

Here is what I have done, and so far - Mail has stabalized and is working again!

I went to ~/Library/Mail/V2/[insert name of account here]

Each of my accounts, three Gmail and one Mac account all conatined three hidden files:

.dat45ab.nnn ( the nnn were different on each account

.mboxCache.plist

.OfflineCache

I shut down Mail and made a "keep" folder and omved all three files in each of the four accounts into the "keep" folder. Re-started Mail and have been stable for over two hours now (earlier today, I lost track of how many times Mail crashed).

@macfrompc: Thanks very much for this tip! I had tried deleteing other things like the Saved Application State folder, but wasn't having any luck and was about to nuke everything and start from scratch. Before doing that I tried your tip and deleted the hidden files in each mail account folder. Now Mail is behaving itself again, and I am a happy guy!

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